Experienced Marketing Writer
Subject: Experienced Marketing Writer
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: 3/22/09, 14:43
To: gigs-hhme5-1086543234@craigslist.org

Hi -

I understand that you're looking for someone to write web content, and I'd like to be considered. I've done similar work for a variety of companies and outlets including America Online, and my other work has appeared in dozens of publications including Vanity Fair.

I've pasted some relevant samples below; the first is an article I did for an industry trade pub, the second is a sales letter/web copy segment I did for an architectural rendering firm in Chicago, and the third is a brochure I wrote for a tech firm in New York. Please take a look and let me know if you'd like to discuss this further.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

Waste Not, Whatnot


by Barrett Brown


The Environmental Protection Agency has deemed the event and trade show industry to be the second largest producer of solid waste in the United States, second only to demolition and construction in this dubious honor. Don't apologize to your kids just yet; solid waste, while none too pretty, is only a small stroke of the brush in the greater ecological picture, with experts having developed new and better criteria as of late to determine who's been mucking up the planet and how much mucking up they've been doing. Besides, your kids may very well have their own apologizing to do. When was the last time you checked the locks on the liquor cabinet?


The implementation of eco-friendly operating procedures is surprisingly easy, increasingly marketable, and almost universally profitable. This, at least, was the central message of last month's

Green Event Summit in San Fransisco, where hundreds of event professionals met to showcase new, greener business practices of potential interest dealer owners, project managers, and the like.


Now, skepticism in the face of increasingly ubiquitous buzzwords like "eco-friendly" is understandable, particularly in the absence of any clear definitions. But the environmental movement has come a long way since the first Earth Day, having since branched out from a propensity for vagueness and granola into something that one can actually take to the bank without getting laughed at by the teller.


It's easy to forget that you can't spell "economic" without "eco" unless you're cheating on a crossword puzzle; those who have pursued greener practices for any particular reason almost always find that they've also managed to save money in the process. And the more mundane the changes, the more surprising the savings often turn out to be. The U.S. Army, for instance, recently audited its paint purchases and discovered that the eco-friendly sorts ended up costing them an average of $1.76 less per can than did the regular types – even when both kinds came from the same supplier.


The trick, though, is to go about these things the right way. The Army saved itself a bundle by consulting with Green Seal (greenseal.org), one of several independent certification groups that reckon degrees of ecological efficiency by reference to "Life Cycle Assessment." As Green Seal environmental scientist Nana Wilberforce explains, an LCA measures the environmental impact of a given product or service by tracing its eco-footprint from cradle to grave, covering everything from the early extraction of raw materials to the later disposal of dangerous materials. "In all," says Wilberforce, "the concept of sustainability must be taken into consideration."


Since most firms don't have an environmental scientist on staff, such a nuanced consideration as that may seem somewhat daunting. Luckily, Green Seal offers a free online database of products and services that have met strict LCA standards. Another non-profit, the Greenguard Environmental Institute (greenguard.org), hosts a similar database with an emphasis on emissions and indoor air quality. Between these two websites alone, one can quickly locate green-certified suppliers of surfacing materials, furnitures paint, textiles, adhesives, fleet vehicle maintenance, cleaning services, print materials, and other items of relevance to the trade show world.


But saving money while going green can be even easier than simply changing suppliers, and the event industry is in a particularly advantageous position to do so. "Saving money on eliminating bottled water is the easiest, low-hanging fruit," says Amy Spatrisano, one of the Green Event Summit's keynote speakers and a principal of Meeting Strategies Worldwide. "We've had clients save $25,000 to $50,000 by not serving bottled water and providing large drinking water containers instead. Caterers can also save 15 to 50 percent on serving items in bulk versus individual packets." At the same time, it's easy to get sloppy in the process. "In their enthusiasm to adopt something green, [companies] don't always think it through," Spatrisano notes. "If you're going to eliminate bottled water and provide a refillable container, make sure the container is made environmentally responsibility." LCA standards to the rescue!


Several of the methods by which display dealers in particular stand to save both money and planets are slightly more complicated, though still well within the realm of the doable. Josh Rose, who serves as the Event Designers and Producers Association's vice president of connectivity and also sits on its board of directors and runs his own consultancy firm to boot, points out that the industry practice of pricing shipments by weight provides an opportunity to kill two birds with one etcetera. "Greener products are being designed into exhibits to reduce weight and add flexibility for future adaptation: more aluminum instead of wood and steel, more fabric instead of wood and laminated or plastic finishes. This reduction in weight has lower material handling costs and fuel costs." Then, there's the recycling route. "The red carpet at Fox events in Hollywood for the last year or two has been standardized, cleaned, and reused instead of going to the landfill," Rose points out. "When you are talking about thousands of square feet, that translates to real dollars. Also, builders are creatively restocking used exhibit components and then 'reskinning' them for the next client or show. Instead of pitching old graphics after a specific event, the graphic has become more generic and reused for multiple events with a changeable tag line. One of our clients has saved over $20,000 a year by using this process on an eight-show circuit."


Once you've gotten on the waste wagon, there still exists the matter of communicating your new-found social responsibility to customers. In a market that's becoming increasingly glutted with such terminology, simply describing your firm as "environmentally-friendly" is akin to offering cheap candy in Candy Land. "Greenwashing is becoming a much bigger issue," says Spatrisano, using a term that denotes the making of misleading claims regarding a firm's ecological commitment. Environmental watchdogs have always been on the lookout for fraud in this regard; now, customers are increasingly savvy to such things as well, so it's important to be specific about your greenery. Point out that you're doing business with "LCA-certified suppliers of green products and services," for instance, and you'll get increased business with those who know their stuff, as well as those who are easily impressed by mysterious acronyms.


Also, don't forget to render your TLK's with an upper-trending FRW before the next FOM.


Just kidding. But seriously, though, LCA is a real thing, and you should get on it ASAP.



It's Not Easy Being Green... Or Is It?

Paul Firth, vice president of technology for the environmental watchdog group Green Standard, has some ideas on how to get the ball rolling:






***


It's Labor Day. We're Laboring.



We've never quite understood why it is that anyone would want to celebrate the end of summer, but that's exactly what a good portion of the American public will be up to this Labor Day. We refuse to commemorate the passing of barbecue season with anything other than tears. Besides, we've got a couple of tricks up our collective sleeve.



Virtual Summer Lovin'


While everyone else is running around smelling like bug spray, we'll be at the office, consoling ourselves with ribs and the wonders of 3d rendering. And while others are out on the lake, we'll be creating advanced 3d models of photorealistic lakeside scenes - the sort that aren't subject to mosquitos, isolated thunderstorms, or unwanted in-laws. By the time we're done applying refraction textures and instituting cloud algorithms, you won't be able to tell the difference between your vacation photos and the renderings we built out of nothing last week. Frankly, we'll have a hard time figuring it out ourselves.



The trick is to look for the ones that are perfect. Those are ours.



Our Clients Love 3d. So Will Yours.


But enough about us. What can Studio2a's advanced approach to 3d do for your company? For starters, it can help you to communicate your concepts to clients through pictures of the sort that are worth well over a thousand words. Ultimately, this can help to eliminate change orders, lost time, wasted resources, and other, similarly unsavory things that tend to result from communicational friction. More importantly, our finished product will help to accentuate the merits of your own, making it that much more likely that your next client presentation ends with a green light.



Problems? Solved.


If they ever get around to proclaiming a "Photorealistic 3d Rendering Day," perhaps we'll take the afternoon off. But probably not.


Give us a call today. We'll be here.


***


(Cover)


Organic Motion


Reinvisioning Vision


"What's not to like here?" - Newsweek


(Page One)


TBA – Reinvisioning Motion Capture


After four years of under-the-radar development, Organic Motion Inc. is set to release the product that will not only redefine motion capture as we know it, but will also bring the technology into the day-to-day lives of those who may never have even heard of it.


Organic Motion's newly-released TBA system shatters the barriers inherent to pre-organic motion capture implementation by ditching the assumptions that have limited the field's potential for more than twenty years. TBA is not an incremental advance in established mopac techniques – rather, it is a comprehensive, top-down overhaul of the entire process, fueled by scientific breakthroughs in computer optics, AI, and the methodology by which the two are combined, and further augmented with a streamlined workflow implementation that cuts time, cuts costs, and cuts manpower requirements. We haven't improved on the wheel; we've reinvented it.


Fundamental to this reinvention is TBA 's extraordinarily unique optical computer intelligence engine, which allows for computerized visualization of the actual human subject itself by way of a pre-programmed conceptual "map" of what a human body looks like, how a human body moves, and where a human's natural body points are located. Bringing the human into human movement detection is not only a natural progression of mocap tech, but is also one of tremendous benefit to every stage of the process, from initial capture to finished product.


The extent of TBA's strength and accuracy is such that one major Northeastern research hospital has partnered with Organic Motion to obtain a grant from the National Institute of Health to use the technology in a study of the effects of cerebral palsy on human movement; the extent of TBA 's customability and ease of use is such that several diverse firms are already making plans to implement it in ways that would have been previously impossible due to the constraints of earlier mocap. Imagine what it can do for your studio.


(Page Two)


Reinvisioning Entertainment


Whereas pre-organic mocap systems required a human subject to be clad in an expensive, cumbersome bodysuit studded with reflecting markers, TBA requires no suit, nor any prep time at all; subjects may simply walk onto the camera zone dressed in street clothes, and the system will immediately capture their every move. Whereas previous mocap systems recorded the positions of a few dozen attached markers, thus giving only a general impression of the body's movement, TBA tracks the body itself – and does so at thousands of natural points recognized by the system's advanced visual mapping AI, from the joints of one's limbs right down to the corners of one's eyes. And whereas previous mocap systems entailed a severe degree of lag between capture and usability, the necessity of technician oversight during use, and weeks of manual data cleanup before an accurate recording could be put into play, TBA eliminates all of these things, delivering clean, usable data in real time, not at some unknown time in the future.


The implications are profound for game developers, 3D animators, university project managers, special effects broadcasters, and anyone else who has already incorporated mocap into their studio output – as well as those who haven't. By lowering the financial threshold for mocap implementation, we turn it into a viable option for those entities engaged in lower-budget projects of the sort that might not have justified the advantages of the technology due to cost considerations. And with the hundred-fold increase in capture accuracy, teams of every shape and size will see dramatic benefits in the quality of their finished product – and they'll see those benefits immediately, thanks to the clean, real time feedback which allows animators to get a full sense of how the data is playing out during the recording process itself, thus freeing them from the technical concerns inherent to pre-organic mocap (did we mention that TBA's organic approach to point tracking entails absolutely no occlusion whatsoever? Pretty sexy, huh?) and encouraging them to get more closely involved in every stage of the creative process.


Our reinvention of mocap promises to similarly redefine the industry, which is why TBA's unveiling at the 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and subsequent demonstrations of the technology's revolutionary potential have so far won us some rather unreserved accolades from Newsweek, Macworld, Engadget, Game Daily, Gamasutra, and others. Organic Motion has already received deposits in advance of the initial product release, with the first one hundred units set for delivery in September 2007.


Get on board. We're reinvisioning vision.